Wednesday, January 12, 2011

The Unstoppable (Chapter Six)

The Unstoppable

Chapter Six: First Mission

I've heard it said, a dozen times in as many ways, that something never comes from nothing. But in the weeks that followed that first day in the laboratory, I couldn't help feeling like my new life had simply appeared out of thin air. Like a flower growing from concrete, it seemed to flourish without soil or water or sunlight. A mystery.

I use this analogy because it had no root. My past was feeling more and more like a blank to me as my time in the other world seemed to fade from reality. I became more and more convinced it was all a dream, and that I'd never really known a Kate, or gone to a university in Dallas to study business. That my family had never drowned or scattered after a horrible car wreck.

Life became simpler, in a lot of ways. I soon found I now lived in (or rather, underneath) a seemingly abandoned office park. The buildings sprawled across a weed chocked block in the slums of a suburb outside greater Chicago. I didn't have to worry about classes, or a job, or taking care of myself anymore.

You'll have to forgive me for skipping ahead a little bit. Two months in fact. It's not that they weren't an incredible two months. If anything they were some of the most remarkable days of my life. But they were also painful, disorienting, and just plain hard.

I spent my days training. Firearms, martial arts, survival. I was given a crash course in everything a secret agent superhero could ever need to know. I worked with dozens of men and women who seemed to come from every walk of life and all shapes and sizes. There didn't seem to be any pattern to who got superpowers and who didn't. It was like a genetic lottery. You either win or you don't, but there's really not a thing on earth that could change your odds, for better or worse.

I spent my nights wallowing in misery. Getting over all I'd lost was no easy thing. Sure, it hadn't all been sunshine and roses, but whose life was? I ate up every ounce of training I could, working myself to the point of absolute exhaustion day after day. Stumbling into my bunk bone weary every night gave me a lot less time to think, after all.

Days of war, nights of grief.

Even though I could regenerate from every kind of wound imaginable, I dragged through life feeling as if I were riddled with hurts, my body aching from the depression.

I've also heard it said that time heals all wounds. Another seemingly mindless cliche, but in the end time did take it all away. It wasn't through attrition that the pain faded, however. It was more the inevitability of change. I soon grew tired of feeling like a rag doll, beat up by day and left to sit and fester at night. My comrades all had names but I could barely recall one of them on a given day, even after two weeks. A growing part of me wanted to live again, to break through all the sadness and leave it behind.

It was like the sun rising. Night always gives way to sunlight eventually. No matter what else changes, we can always count on the morning to come. And come it did, even if it didn't arrive in a way I ever would have expected...


Two months later...


"Okay, Blackpool. If you can break through this one, I'll not only do your laundry, I'll buy you lunch for a week."

We stood in the arena known as the "rumble room", a massive open space deep underground specifically for the purpose of testing abilities to the limit. The eager man from the lab, whose name was Tony something or other, stood about twenty feet away from me, looking earnest as ever.

I hesitated. The last two weeks had changed me, a metamorphosis I could not return from. I was learning to embrace violence, a frightening notion for someone like me. Someone who had always lived a peaceful life.

Or had I? Sometimes it was difficult to say. I hovered between two lives, and two worlds.

Tony's powers were all mental. He could control people like puppets for very brief periods of time. Some people were more susceptible to this, some were more difficult for him to hold. Tony could also create invisible barriers, and cause people to see things that weren't there. In short, he could also affect what they perceived.

I had proven somewhat adept at sparring with him, and he was fairly resilient, so we'd become workout partners of a sort, if not truly friends.

"Alright," I said, shrugging off my hesitation. "Let's do this."

But first, I should explain. As a mobilus, my powers were affected by my emotions. If I got angry, I had one power (flame), if I was afraid, another (lightning). People like me were considered to have a very short life expectancy, due to how incredibly difficult it could be to control our powers, when it means controlling our emotions.

But I was determined to prove it all wrong, and beat the statistic.

My feelings were also the source of my power, and they could make me strong. I still couldn't control some of them. I had yet to get water to obey me and freeze. I wasn't even sure what could trigger it. But I knew what came of fear, anger, and sadness and those I had in spades.

Luckily, flight, telekinesis and regeneration were not fueled by my thoughts, but I still found flying very difficult. And my telekinesis was wild at best. I usually wound up crushing or hurling into walls whatever I tried to pick up.

Ok, so back to our fight.

I struck first. I was always the one to strike first. I simply did not have the patience to wait and Tony could endure endlessly. Sometimes he would just stand there like a statue, relaxed. It was completely at odds with his personality, yet somehow he pulled it off.

I started out with a burst of lightning that flew from my fingertips in an arc, straight for his chest. A charge filled the air. At the last second possible my hand decided to swing upward to the ceiling as if it had changed its mind. My shot harmlessly crashed into the ceiling far above.

Rage, I needed to work myself into a rage. The handy thing about anger was, it didn't just give me the ability to create and control fire, it also made me completely indestructible. Which is a lot more pleasant than simple regeneration, let me tell you.

Today's response was swift. As I charged forward, closing the distance between us in seconds, he threw out a barrier that should have broken my nose. As it was it barely slowed me down. With a low snarl I leapt, throwing both my arms before me. Both my hands erupted in flame, and I let fly a pillar of fire that flew straight for his face.

This time, when he tried to control my mind, I felt it, and I resisted. Unable to divert my attack, he was forced to duck. He fell to the floor and began to roll aside. I would have landed right on top of him but my jump was cut short very roughly by another barrier. I slammed into it and was knocked in the other direction.

I landed on my feet and spun towards him, stretched my arms out, and fired again. This time the flames hit their mark, to my shock. Tony fell to the ground blazing. I let out a hoarse cry of shock and ran towards him, to help him put out the inferno. However, as soon as I got close, he disappeared.

Oh, shoot.

I'd been fooled.

Tony was behind me, of course. He wasted no time locking my right arm behind my back and slipping another arm around my neck, pinning me. "I've been saving that one," he said, I could practically hear the grin in his voice. "Wasn't sure you'd actually fall for it."

I was just about to try and shake him with a little jolt of lightning when a door chime interrupted our match. Candi, an older woman who acted as a sort of dispatch for the Agency, sauntered into the room. Everywhere she went, she walked slowly, no matter how urgent the issue was. It wouldn't matter if China was about to turn the country into a nuclear furnace or if your pizza delivery had arrived, she still walked that same steady pace. I didn’t know what the vell's powers were, but I was pretty confident I could rule out super speed.

Ignoring me, she handed Tony a large black envelope. At once Tony ripped it open and began studying the sheets of paper inside, a grim expression taking over his face. I’d seen black envelopes handed out a few times before, but I’d never been told what they meant.

"Agents Kramer and Blackpool, you have been activated. Your mission is priority two. You are to leave within three hours. You will be accompanied by IO Sabrina Rathbone." She spoke with a slight southern drawl that lent a lyrical quality to her voice. Without having looked at me once, Candi turned and walked away. Tony never treated me like an inferior, so it made it much easier to forget he was much higher up on the Agency totem pole than I was.

As Tony quietly studied our orders, I wrestled with what Candi had told him. I wasn’t sure I liked anything I’d heard. Missions were ranked by priority. The lower the number, the more important they were. I’d only heard a “two” get assigned once or twice. This wasn’t the worst news for me though. I was eager to get out in the field. No, worse would be working with Sabrina again, the intelligence officer (or IO) who looked just like Kate. We’d had a few runs in the past weeks, none of them pleasant. She didn’t seem to like me at all, which was just as well because the sight of her made me terribly uncomfortable.

And then there was that black envelope. It niggled at my mind. I wanted to ask Tony just what it meant, but I never got the chance. “Ready for your first mission, newbie?” He asked, looking up from the documents that had heretofore occupied his attention. He seemed distracted now, unfocused. “I’ve got to brief the IO, meet me at the elevators at 1400 on the dot. Civilian dress, light arms.” I nodded, the question forming on my lips, but he was gone.

So. A mission at long last. Two months hardly seemed like enough time, but nothing about this agency was normal. I didn't mind though.

I had to prove them wrong. I had a statistic to overcome.

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